In the world of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) (e.g. high speed IP-based networks), network operators and service providers are increasingly faced with the challenge of determining which new services can be marketed and made profitable, and then rapidly deploying these new services. Traditionally, service providers have independently developed and delivered new services themselves. However, this intra-provider service delivery paradigm involves a lengthy cycle of creating a service from scratch, deploying and provisioning the service into the network, and operating the service accordingly. As can be seen, a fundamental deficiency in this paradigm is that a service provider needs to go through all phases in the delivery lifecycle in order to generate new revenue. For a service provider, there are inherent delays and costs between service-inception and service operation, whether the service is developed internally or outsourced by a third party. In addition, there is no guarantee that the service will be accepted by the market or generate the necessary revenue to sustain it once operational. Overall, this approach requires that service providers make substantial upfront investments in new services and take on considerable risk when deploying new services.
Nonetheless, there are many service providers today, each with their own administrative domains, providing many different services to the subscribers of that domain. As a result, service providers are adopting a new business model for delivering new and value-added services to subscribers that has the potential to substantially reduce the time to market and risk associated with introducing such services themselves.
Specifically, subscribers today may have multiple service providers and/or multiple services within and across these providers but see no consistency and aggregation among the services. As a result, service providers are providing new services by bundling multiple distributed services both within and across service provider domains. When a service provider bundles a third party's already operational and profitable or popular service with its own, the provider decreases time to market and increases its probability of market acceptance. This approach also minimizes risk from erroneous analysis of service marketability, and how to deploy, operate, and maintain new services for profitability.
However, while this new model is proving successful, the current methods for bundling/combining services are highly customized and achieved through point-to-point software integration that tends to require laboriously crafted arrangements between the providers. The result is new services that require extensive bi-lateral negotiation and integration, resulting in the tight coupling of existing services.
For example, one existing service integration technique, called the generic application integration approach, requires two applications/systems/enterprises to message through a queued integration framework. Specifically, messages from a first service application are transmitted to the framework, queued, transformed multiple times, and eventually forwarded to the receiving service application in a format that the receiving application readily understands. In a second approach, called the API approach, two applications/systems/enterprises communicate through well-defined and controlled programmatic interfaces that specify all parameters and formats. In this approach, transformation is not generally required since the receiving application simply enforces formatting through the interface it offers to other systems. However, a shortcoming of this approach is that if the interface semantics or syntax changes, all calling systems will also be affected, causing a costly cascade of modifications.
As can be seen, these existing techniques essentially require expensive point-to-point integrations resulting in “n×n” interfaces (assuming there are “n” service applications). In addition, the bundled services typically lack any type of coordination and control between each other. Furthermore, the central control logic of each service application typically has to be customized for each interconnection, creating tightly coupled systems. In addition, because each of the bundled services is expected to function both as a standalone application and as a single component of an integrated application, and because the integration affects the central control logic, the nature of integration is constrained to the actual “workflow” engine of these applications. These drawbacks also limit the number of service applications that can be bundled.
For NGN service providers, service integration approaches such as these are not ideal. Although the approaches create an environment for creating new services, these new services are comprised of tightly coupled existing services making these new services inflexible and making the deployment of these new services difficult to change. In the NGN service provider world, which is characterized by the rapid introduction and removal of dynamic services, this is not acceptable.